The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  Maggs ran toward the pickup as the Talib in the bed of the truck came to his knees. The Talib’s AK had gotten caught behind him. He scrabbled for it as blood poured out of the shoulder. Then the Talib gave up and tentatively lifted his hands over his shoulders—

  And as he did, Maggs fired a burst and he went down. No prisoners. Not here, not now.

  THE NISSAN ROLLED UP and the four Deltas jumped out. Armstrong handed the laptop to Task, the driver, and waved him back into the car. “Task, get around the pickup. If something goes wrong here, you take this and go.” He turned to the other Deltas. “Snyder’s stuck. Leg’s broken. Got to get him out.”

  The smoke was thicker now, but Armstrong crawled back into the van as the three Deltas tried to pry open the door. Before they could open it, Snyder screamed, a lungful of obscenities that echoed over the valley. Armstrong had him by the shoulders and was tugging him toward the back of the van. Maggs ran to the back of the van, and together he and Armstrong pulled Snyder out as flames rose from the front of the Mitsubishi. Armstrong and Snyder were coughing, and soot covered Snyder’s face.

  “We got you,” Armstrong said.

  Armstrong and Maggs and the Deltas carried Snyder to the Nissan, fifty feet past the pickup. Behind them, the van’s gas tank exploded. The van jumped six inches. When it landed, its windows were gone and yellow-orange flames rose from its body.

  Armstrong nodded at the burning remains of the van. “We won’t be taking that home.”

  “The pickup.”

  “Let’s leave it in the road. Buy us some time. We’ll all ride with Task.”

  “Gonna be as crowded as that bus.” Maggs looked at the valley below. Ten miles away, at the edge of Mingora, a convoy of cars streamed toward them in the dark. “I’m gonna fix that roadblock.”

  As Armstrong and the other Deltas arranged Snyder in the Nissan, Maggs grabbed a grenade and ran for the pickup. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned on the engine and backed up. Metal ground on metal as the pickup pulled away from the van, forming a metal L, that blocked the road completely.

  Maggs stepped ten feet away and tossed a grenade inside the pickup and dove for the side of the road. He covered his hands from the twin explosions that followed as first the grenade and then the Toyota’s gas tank blew and the night turned white.

  Thunder broke overhead, as if the skies were applauding. Maggs ran for the Nissan, a hundred feet ahead. When he got there, the trunk was open, holes shot through for air.

  “Me or you,” Armstrong said, looking down at the trunk.

  “Long as it’s not both of us. You’re taller. Stay in the car.” Maggs climbed in and settled himself, shoving aside an AK that was poking into his back. Armstrong slammed down the lid.

  * * *

  THE NEXT THREE HOURS were among the most unpleasant of Maggs’s life. The road twisted like a badly designed amusement park ride: Check out the new Nausea-Coaster. Rain poured into the trunk through the air holes, soaking him to the skin. And he had no way of knowing if the Talibs were closing. Though maybe not knowing was for the best. He’d find out when the shooting started.

  But it never did. And finally, the car stopped and the lid popped open. He stretched his cramped legs but didn’t try to move. He shivered wildly. He hadn’t realized just how cold he was. In the distance he heard traffic, trucks passing.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Armstrong said.

  “Putting the black man in the trunk. Racism, pure and simple.”

  “Believe me, it was no fun up front.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Five minutes from the Islamabad-Peshawar highway, my friend. We made it. Never even saw them. Roadblock worked. Nice job.” Armstrong reached a hand down. Maggs waved it off.

  “I’m comfy. Wake me back at the embassy.”

  “Come on, you gotta be freezing.”

  “Let’s just get it done.” Maggs wasn’t sure why he was protesting. He only knew they’d have to drag him out of the trunk now.

  THEY WERE BACK at the embassy before sunrise. Maggs knew he ought to sleep, but he was too jacked. They all were. Even Snyder, with his broken leg. And not just because of the insanity of what they’d just pulled off.

  No, they all had the same question.

  “What do you think?” Armstrong said, as he unwrapped the plastic that encased the laptop. It was an IBM ThinkPad, an X60. Maggs was no tech, but it looked undamaged to him. It even had its charger taped to the bottom.

  “Really hot Paki porn,” Task said.

  “They have hot porn?”

  “No. That’s why it’s so special.”

  “Horse porn.”

  “Horse-dog porn.”

  “A horse doing a dog? That’s just sick. Where do you get that, Task?”

  Maggs plugged in the charger, reached for the on button, then stopped.

  “What if there’s a virus on it, erases the hard drive as soon as we touch it?”

  “If something goes wrong, we’ll turn it off, unplug it,” Armstrong said. “It can’t delete itself that fast.”

  “You sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  They should wait, Maggs thought. But they’d nearly died tonight for this lump of plastic. They’d earned the right to its secrets. He reached for the power button and they watched as the machine sprung to life.

  24

  Brant Murphy,” Shafer said. “Brant F. Murphy. Know what the F stands for?”

  “I can guess.”

  “This guy’s like a bad dream. Everywhere we turn.”

  “Ellis. You said you don’t believe in big conspiracies.”

  “I’m starting to.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Even when Duto put me under house arrest, back in the day, I understood. Didn’t like it, but I understood. He had his reasons. But this feels different. Not like some bureaucratic snafu. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  And yet Wells felt a tingle of what could only be called excitement, the thrill of operating without a net, without the agency behind him. He remembered the months after he had first come back to the United States from Pakistan, when he’d broken out of CIA custody and gone to ground in Atlanta. He’d lived lonely and pure.

  Shafer seemed to glimpse Wells’s enthusiasm. “The lady doth protest too much.”

  They sat in Shafer’s kitchen, watching Tonka chase squirrels around the oak tree in the backyard. A fat gray squirrel dashed past up the tree and danced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, chittering down as the dog barked furiously back.

  “I’ll get you a ladder,” Wells yelled.

  “I know how she feels,” Shafer said. “Just hoping for a mistake.”

  “Are we the squirrels or Tonka?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “I’m starting to miss the jihadis,” Wells said. “At least I know what they want. This I don’t understand at all. Did Murphy, Whitby, and Terreri really team up to kill everybody in 673?”

  “We still need a motive. A couple of million dollars isn’t enough. Not split three ways. Not for this.”

  “What if it was more? A lot more. Say 673 got onto something, some secret account for bin Laden that had fifty million dollars in it. A hundred. Pick whatever number you want. They take the money and then they kill the detainees. The whole squad’s in on it. The detainees have to die because if they ever get to Gitmo, they’re going to tell their lawyers about all this money. Murphy comes back here, gets D’Angelo to delete the names, so nobody ever knows the detainees even existed. The squad disbands, and somebody has an attack of conscience. Sends a note to the IG. Alleging torture and theft. And Murphy and Terreri don’t know who sent it. So, they decide to eliminate the rest of the squad. And Whitby, he’s happy with the intel they got, he doesn’t want to hear anything else.”

  Not for the first time, Wells was struck by the enormous gap between the agency’s headquarters and its frontline operatives. The lords of the intelligence community sat in their offices a
t Langley and Liberty Crossing, pretending they were in charge. Until something went wrong. Then they told the prosecutors and the congressional investigators that they couldn’t be expected to know exactly what was happening on the front lines.

  “Possible,” Shafer said. “But let me ask you. Why didn’t the letter mention a hundred-million-dollar bank account? Plenty of accusations in there. Why not that? And why cut Whitby in? For that matter, can you see this whole squad killing two prisoners in cold blood? Can you see Jerry Williams going for that? And one more thing. I don’t like Brant Murphy, either. But would he murder his own squad? Or anyone else.”

  Wells tried to picture Murphy putting a bullet in someone. Even ordering a hit. And couldn’t.

  “Or even Fred Whitby. It takes a certain disregard — a certain coldness—”

  “I know, Ellis. Better than you.” Wells looked at Shafer. “Or not. I never have gotten the stories, what you did all those years running around Africa. And behind the Wall.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “I think of you as this oldster whose socks don’t match, but you weren’t always.”

  “I wasn’t,” Shafer said. “Maybe there’s another explanation for what happened. And it comes from something we keep forgetting.”

  Wells waited.

  “The Pakistani nuke depots. Massive coup. Unless Whitby and Duto are flat-out lying, we got it because of intel that 673 developed. Terreri and Murphy must have known it would get noticed at the highest levels. And that they would have to produce the prisoners who gave it up. But what if those prisoners were dead? Problem. Best solution, make the names disappear. Let the intel stand on its own.”

  “So, in this scenario the prisoners weren’t killed pintentionally? ”

  “Maybe they tried to escape, got shot. Maybe Jack Fisher interrogated them too hard and they died.”

  “So, these detainees had the list of all the nuclear weapons depots in Pakistan. Where they’re located, how they’re guarded.”

  “I admit, that part doesn’t work. Crazy as the Paks are, I can’t see them giving that info to a terrorist.”

  “Try this,” Wells said. “We kidnapped a Pak general. We got the info on the weapons depots from him, and we killed him accidentally on purpose and we made him disappear.”

  “And the ISI went along with it? We killed one of their top guys and they didn’t care?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know. They thought he defected.” Wells shook his head even before he finished. “It still doesn’t work.”

  “Brant Murphy’s going to have to explain it for us.”

  “We can’t get to him. We show up at CTC, he calls Whitby, Whitby calls Duto.”

  “That’s half right, John. We can’t get to him at CTC.”

  “You’re not saying we go back to Kings Park West.”

  Shafer nodded. And Wells could only smile.

  “Know what I like about you, Ellis? You’re as crazy as me.”

  BUT GETTING TO MURPHY at home proved as hard as getting to him at work. After the murders of Jack Fisher and Mike Wyly, the agency had given Murphy a permanent protective detail. An unmarked van, two guards inside, sat in front of the house around the clock. An armor-plated Lincoln Town Car ferried him to and from Langley. When he had to drive on his own, he used an agency Suburban, also armor-plated. But he rarely went anywhere except the gym. And wherever he went, two guards always shadowed him.

  Because Murphy’s guards were CIA officers, Wells and Shafer couldn’t use any of the agency’s unmarked vehicles. Instead, a friend of Shafer’s at the FBI let them borrow from the bureau’s surveillance fleet, which included everything from bank vans to FedEx trucks to a 1988 Jaguar XJS. They switched cars every day, sometimes twice a day.

  They did have one advantage: Murphy wasn’t the only one in Kings Park West who’d bet on real estate. Every fourth house in the neighborhood seemed to be for sale, giving them a good excuse to drive around. They scheduled appointments to visit houses in the early evening, hoping to catch Murphy making a mistake, going for a run or out to dinner without his bodyguards.

  But after a week, they were no closer to getting to him or even figuring out how they might. “We need to face facts,” Wells said, on the fifth day of their drive-bys. “This isn’t working.”

  “He’ll let his guard down,” Shafer said.

  “Not soon enough. And the guards are in the way.”

  “We can find a nonlethal way to take them out.”

  “Long shot, but say we can. Then what? We kidnap Murphy? Where do we take him, Ellis? Your house? It’s insane.”

  “You can always get to people.”

  “I couldn’t get to Ivan Markov. As much as I wanted to. And we’re not talking about killing him. We’re talking about interrogating him. Which means we can’t cut and run. It means we need time with him. Which we won’t have. And why exactly do we think he’s gonna talk to us now? He didn’t before.”

  “We didn’t have D’Angelo before.”

  “Ellis, no matter how many different cars we borrow, we’re low on time. Two guys can’t run long-term surveillance on a defended target. Especially not here. It’s too quiet. I can feel people watching me. We’re going to get spotted. In days. Not weeks.”

  Shafer didn’t argue.

  “It’s time to clue the bureau in,” Wells said. “Tell them everything. If they knew about the letter and D’Angelo, they might make progress. Or I can go back to New Orleans, talk to Noemie Williams, see if she remembers anything. Or Steve Callar. Or maybe we need to talk to Duto, see if he’ll tell us what game we’re playing.”

  “Let’s give it a couple more days, see if anything breaks. It’s just possible Murphy’ll get bored, go for a drive on his own. Or a run, even better.”

  “Two days,” Wells said. “No more.”

  AND SOMETHING DID BREAK, though it wasn’t what Wells had expected.

  Three p.m. Saturday, the seventh and final day of surveillance. Shafer was watching his daughter play softball, so Wells was alone. He had just cruised by Murphy’s house in a Verizon van. The armored van sat out front, as usual, a red Ford Econoline with two unsmiling men in front.

  Then he saw two cars in the driveway of a foreclosure that was the closest empty house to Murphy’s. The first was a blue Audi A4 with a vanity Virginia license plate: “SLHOUSE.” It belonged to Sandra (“Call me Sandy”) Seward, a Century 21 agent who had several listings in the area. Wells had met her during his house-buying excursion. The second was a black Toyota Tercel. Wells had seen it before. Precisely three nights ago, stopping in front of Murphy’s house. At the time, it had worn a Domino’s Pizza sign on its roof. The driver hadn’t gotten out of the Tercel. He’d simply lowered his window, said something to the guys in the van — asking for directions, presumably — and driven off. Wells kept driving, reached for his phone, called Shafer.

  “ YOU SURE ABOUT THIS? ”

  “He’s doing the same thing we are,” Wells said. “Casing Murphy, staking out the neighborhood as quietly as he can.”

  “Because if you’re right, then we have to throw everything out. Murphy’s not involved. The killer’s on the outside. Unless Whitby’s put a contract out on Murphy. Which makes even less sense.”

  “I’m telling you, this is the guy.”

  They decided not to go after him at the house. They had no authority to make an arrest, and if the guy pulled a weapon, they risked getting the real-estate agent hurt and alerting Murphy’s guards. Instead, they would have to chance tailing the Tercel. Wells guessed the guy, whoever he was, was staying at a low-rent motel in D.C., a place that would take cash so he didn’t have to use a credit card.

  They split up, positioned themselves at intersections on Braddock Road, which ran between Kings Park and the Beltway. If they missed him, they would have to alert Murphy’s guards to watch for a black Tercel. But Wells much preferred to find the guy himself, figure out who he was, before getting the agency or the Feds involved.
/>
  For an hour, Wells sat in a bank parking lot on the corner of Twin-brook and Braddock, watching the lights change. The Tercel didn’t show. He wondered if they had lost the guy, or if maybe he’d been wrong all along.

  Then his phone rang.

  “I got him,” Shafer said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the Tercel was on the Beltway, Wells and Shafer behind. They crossed the Woodrow Wilson Bridge east into Maryland, then turned north on 295. The driver kept in the right lane at a steady fifty-eight. Probably he was worried about being pulled over in a car with fake plates. But caution made him an easy tail.

  At Route 50, the Tercel turned west, into D.C., over the narrow, sluggish Anacostia River. Wells felt a faint thrill as he crossed over the bridge. He would always remember meeting Exley at the Kenilworth gardens, barely a mile from here, on the night that Omar Khadri had called him to New York. Exley. He didn’t know how to leave her behind. And yet he had. Maybe he just needed a cute New Hampshire cop who would take him on hikes and bust his chops when he retreated too far into himself. Maybe he needed to give that a try, anyway.

  Two miles west of the Anacostia, Route 50 became New York Avenue, a rambling strip of liquor stores, strip clubs, fast-food restaurants, and cheap motels. Surveillance here was trickier. Shafer jumped the Tercel, so that they would at least have a chance at him if he made a light that Wells missed.

  Just past Montana, the Tercel turned into the parking lot for the Budget Motor Inn. Wells cruised by in time to see the Tercel pull into a spot in front of room 112. Ten minutes later, Wells and Shafer were sitting down the block at a KFC.

  Shafer had insisted on buying a four-piece dinner special, giving Wells the dubious pleasure of watching him eat. As he chewed, he spun the drumstick like an ear of corn. Disgusting but efficient, like so much that Shafer did.

  “Sure you don’t want some?”

  “Yes,” Wells said. Though he hadn’t eaten KFC in a long time and the chicken looked tasty. Terrible, but tasty. If that combination was possible. “When do we call the cops?”